Presenting at Global Scrum Gathering Vienna is your chance to contribute to the global Agile and Scrum movement. Please consider helping to make an impact on hundreds of agilists in our community by telling your story and bringing light to knowledge and trends that will inspire others.

Thank you to everyone who submitted. Call for Papers is now officially closed.

What We're Looking For:

Often you find yourself in a self-organising team with a great track record of delivering working products. Yet, your organisation still feels short changed by agile and doesn’t see the innovation or new ideas this way of working supposedly brings.

The team's reaction may be to try something experimental that may not actually work. The goal is to learn fast and gain insight. Yet again, these same teams meet resistence from the very organisation seeking innovation. To move beyond this, an organisation needs to be open to the idea of falsifiability; the possibility that the worst ideas might actually deliver the greatest impact.

Falsifiability: the capacity for some proposition, statement,

theory or hypothesis to be proven wrong

Only when organisations embrace uncertainty can true breakthrough discoveries emerge.

Reframing failure as lessons to be learned make people stronger.

Let’s hear case studies without filters of professional failure stories, great stories about screw ups, boldly celebrating our worst blunders, bad ideas that did amazing things, situations where teams or individuals made something new out of an old idea and stories of when success was found in failure.

Timeline

Submissions Deadline and System Close: 14 February at 11:59 p.m. (GMT +1)

Review Phase; 15 February – 29 March 2019

Accepted/Rejected Notifications Sent: Week of 15 April 2019

Deadline for Accepted Speakers to Confirm: Speakers have 48 hours to confirm once notified

Program Announced: Early June 2019

What's the Next Step?

Please review the entire submission guidelinesbefore you proceed with your submission. It has all the details you need to know.

You’ll need to create a User Profile the first time you use the system. If you need assistance, contact us here. Use “Login request for Call for papers Vienna” in the Subject field.

Once your profile is created, advance through the submission form to complete fields as you’re prepared. You may “save” your submission at any time and return at a later date to continue work.

While not all fields are required, it is highly recommended all fields be completed to best outline your proposal.

Several fields throughout the submission will be used for web program listing, mobile app, and social media promotion. Please consider these fields when providing details and uploading headshots.

Themes

We want an insightful and entertaining experience for attendees. That said, we’re looking for proposals for presentations and workshops/interactive sessions that follow the path of our Gathering themes:

Enterprise Agility

Radical Innovation

Environmental Safety

The Leader in You: Share Your Story and Inspire Others

Technical Excellence

The Worst Idea That Actually Worked

High-level Guidelines

When selecting submissions, please bear in mind the following:

Your submission should clearly contribute towards the theme goal.

The submission should be new and not a repeat from a previous Gathering or conference.

Give a very clear indication of the experience level of the intended target audience.

You must submit (or link to) a video showcasing your presentation skills (it doesn’t have to be presenting this topic).

Agile is no longer just a fad or limited to software development. In fact, there’s growing evidence that not only can Agile be used for delivering products and services at speed; it’s also extremely useful as an enterprise framework for helping businesses succeed. In a time where the future is becoming harder to predict, enterprise agility and an organisation’s ability to re-invent itself are key to survival.

It’s time to look beyond the frameworks used for scaling Agile beyond IT and understand the DNA of a successful transformation that leads to sustainable enterprise agility. Real life examples and enactments take participants through the storms that organisations go through in the process.

Radical innovation is based on the idea of providing a revolutionary solution. Scrum, on the other hand, provides an environment for incremental iterative change – evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Innovation comes from a combination of radical and incremental thinking.

Creating a radical idea is just the starting point for innovation processes. To move the innovation into a real product, strategy is key. We wonder: Can Agile frameworks curate strategy to bring the innovation process forward?

We want people to walk away with fresh ideas based on practical knowledge of how inspection and adaption shows up in radical innovation. We’re looking for examples where teams have been radically innovative. Discuss the reasons for that and explore the benefits. Bring the WOW factor to the audience and show how you did it. What kind of environment was needed to get to it? During experimentation, how have the results been inspected and newly-obtained insight integrated into future thinking so we can act on and optimize the effectiveness? The audience should get an idea of the essential ingredients to move an unusual innovated idea forward into a successful/best selling product.

One of the most exciting developments in the Agile space over the past few years is the number of high-profile organisations who have adopted the framework to deliver transformational change at enterprise level. Momentum is building beyond software development.

For some organisations, being more Agile is a matter of survival. For others, it’s a way of gaining competitive advantage. Whatever the objectives, such evolution also brings sizeable challenges, especially in terms of the required cultural shift.

One of the key goals is to create a safe environment where people can adopt Agile mindsets and behaviors without feeling that it might be detrimental to their job (or personal) security. In instances where a “blame” culture is prevalent, showing “courage” (a Scrum value) and “failing fast, learning fast” is often seen as career suicide. It can be equally challenging for senior managers and directors who have to relinquish control and empower their teams, without feeling that this will bring greater risk to their organisation.

Create a space in which attendees learn about and experiment with ways an organisation can build a healthy and safe environment where Agile can flourish. Ideally, this will be good blend of real-life case studies and interactive sessions to support experimental learnings that brings the key principles to life.

Tell us your Agile story. How did you start? Did you change as a person? How passionate are you? What drives you to keep moving learning and improving? Let’s inspire others to start or move forward on their personal and professional transformation journeys. By sharing with the community what drives you to step out of you comfort zone and embrace an Agile mindset, you can ignite a new passion for the next great leader.

People from all backgrounds are driven to learn and perhaps embrace professional and personal growth. We believe the Agile community around the world – with meetups, COPs, user groups, public speaking, and Gatherings like this one – are a great place to get inspired and integrate with a likeminded network (build community).

We are sure there are a lot of motivational stories out there, so please share!

The quality of software products is the key to success for many organisations. Slow websites or defect-ridden applications can destroy the reputation of a business and drive customers elsewhere.

Technical Excellence has become a popular subject amongst the software development community. Some hot topics include: Clean Code, Continuous Delivery, Architecture & Design, and Specification by Example.

Effective implementation of software development practices requires behavioral changes from those in software development teams, and a change in mindset from people across the organisation. This will have a significant impact on any organisation attempting to embed these ways of working.

Let’s provide a forum for attendees to talk through examples of how they have introduced the key components of technical excellence and discuss the impact that had on their organisation. We’d like to explore ideas on how to upskill in these techniques and to discuss the challenges of implementing them. We also want to explore the limitations given by the organisational culture and how teams can overcome such limitations.